Turn of the Card

By Michelle West

A short story of 10k words, originally published in Tarot Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Lawrence Schimel.

Shelagh was a mother, living in a small home, on the edge of the rest of her life with a husband she adored.

Now, she lives alone. Her husband remains convalescent in a care facility, wordless and unable to walk. All of the promise of life, of future, is gone, and she wants no reminders of the past—but she finds one: a pack of carefully hand-crafted Tarot Cards that she made for him on a long-ago day when the future seemed to matter.

Those cards are one of the few remaining things that bind them together—but to what end?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosdan Press
• Release date: Jul 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781927094433

Book preview

Turn of the Card

Turn of the Card

Michelle West

Rosdan Press

Copyright © 1997 by Michelle Sagara

Intro © 2003

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Contents

Introduction

i

ii

iii

About the Author

Also by Michelle West

Also by Michelle Sagara

Other Short Stories

Introduction

Lawrence Schimel asked me to write a story for his Tarot anthology. This is the story he got. I like it, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is its theme. It, like so many of my works, long or short, deals with grief.

I think our society gives grief such short shrift. This wasn’t always the case, and I’m not sure why it’s become so, but there you have it. Death is an event, but it’s an event that is marked by a funeral, a wake or post-funeral gathering, and then a lot of careful silence, as if life now just moves on past this milestone.

And in a fashion, it does.

I have never been afraid to die. I have always, on the other hand, feared death, because death means loss. All of my earliest nightmares involved the deaths of my parents, for instance, and while this can be seen psychologically as the fear of abandonment, in the waking world, I saw it differently. It’s final. There is no arguing with it. A door closes and pounding on it makes no difference, because no one’s home.

I could write about death and its consequences for pages, and I will — but later; this is not the only story informed by its shadow.

A friend in Toronto who is also a writer read the story and remarked that it was, in his opinion, truly horrific. As he writes horror, I thought this was surprising, because I don’t write it, and don’t often read it; I find it too unnerving. He said, My horror is like a roller coaster. This is grimmer — this is the type of horror you face in real life, and you often don’t recover from. He added that he almost didn’t finish the story.

But he did.

The funny thing is: it wasn’t horror to me. I wasn’t trying to write horror; I was trying to write fantasy. I’m not sure what that says about me.

i

She made those cards.

Watching them as he turns them and places them precisely into their proper position, she sees their frayed edges, their cracked and worn pictures; major arcana now sun-bleached and sweat-damaged beyond all repair. The deck was a naive attempt at a work of art, but as with many a naive attempt, was the vessel for the whole of her heart while she worked to make a gift.

For him.

It is so hard to look at him.

The cards tell